Who gets Mindfulness 'Right'? An Engaged Buddhist Perspective

Previously, I wrote about the historical and ideological blind spots and the challenges of cultural translation that circumscribe the emergent "Western Buddhism." In this article, I want to examine these challenges in relation to the widespread adaptation of mindfulness meditation across diverse contexts.

As a novice Buddhist practitioner I have been cultivating mindfulness for some ten years now. My formal practice follows the teachings of the Thai Forest Tradition of Ajahn Chah as well as the Burmese insight meditation lineage of S.N. Goenka (through to U Ba Khin and Ledi Sayadaw).

I disclose my personal history and affiliations of practice here not to flaunt my "credentials" as such, but to be upfront about the normative position from which I am interrogating the cultural politics surrounding mindfulness.

In particular, I am taking the standpoint of engaged Buddhism, which is a transnational movement that seeks to develop the Buddhist path of Awakening as a spiritual-social praxis for our contemporary times. From this perspective, the pursuit of personal wellbeing is inseparable from social conscience and engagement.

What I want to consider specifically from an engaged Buddhist perspective are ethical and political issues regarding attention policing and border control, which risk being glossed over in the rush to celebrate the so-called mindfulness revolution, especially in corporatised institutional settings.

Attention policing

There is a tendency in popular non-Buddhist discourses on mindfulness to characterise the practice as "non-judgmental" awareness. But several Buddhist commentators, including the eminent American monk and translator of classical Buddhist texts Bhikkhu Bodhi, have questioned the reductiveness of this definition.

Mindfulness training must begin with a receptive and open attitude that attends to whatever feeling or sensation or thought that arises in the moment without reacting with habitual craving or aversion towards the perceived pleasantness or unpleasantness or neutrality of the experience. But this initial reception of sensorial and perceptual impressions with non-reactive awareness has to be followed through with the ardent application of what is described in Buddhist teachings as appropriate attention and the clear comprehension of the conditionality of phenomenal reality-selfhood.

To put it in general practical terms, one attends to the processes of the body-mind to investigate habitual reactions to feelings, sensations and thought patterns. The aim is to understand how these habits have been conditioned as taken-for-granted modes of behaviour and ways of relating to the world. Crucially, one has to investigate whether these habits are wholesome or unwholesome in cause and effect, so as to nourish or relinquish them accordingly.

In this way, mindfulness is guided by an ethical imperative which requires the practitioner to cultivate a wise and compassionate ethos of care and engagement towards self, others and the world. Mindfulness is, therefore, not exactly non-judgmental but rather entails an ongoing evaluative task of being heedful and discerning about the intentions driving the actions of body, speech and mind.

My point in drawing attention to the Buddhist origin and principles of mindfulness is not to suggest that Buddhism has monopoly over the practice. Nor is it to suggest that others are wrong to adapt the practice in non-Buddhist contexts. As Bhikkhu Bodhi has explained, the adaptations of mindfulness in therapeutic, rehabilitative, or even business settings are to be commended if they can help the individual develop greater wellbeing. But Bhikkhu Bodhi is also an advocate of engaged Buddhism. His concerns about how clarifying the guiding principles of mindfulness invite us to take pause to reflect carefully on the broader ethical and political stakes involved in the commodifying and institutionalising trend.

Mindfulness is guided by an ethical imperative which requires the practitioner to cultivate a wise and compassionate ethos of care and engagement towards self, others and the world.

Consider, for instance, how Google's presentation on its corporate mindfulness program at a conference in February 2014 was interrupted by Buddhist activists who were campaigning against the adverse impacts of rapid expansion by technology corporations in the San Francisco Bay Area. The activists jumped onto the stage to chant, "Wisdom means stop displacement! Wisdom means stop surveillance!" They claimed that "Google should not be speaking as experts on mindfulness, when they're playing a role in displacement, privatization of public assets, for-profit surveillance, profiling, policing, and targeting of activist communities."

After the activists were removed from the stage, without acknowledging or refuting their allegations, the Google spokesperson directed the audience to "check in with your body" to "feel what it's like to be in conflict with people with heartfelt ideas."

This advice about being attuned to the body is not in itself incompatible with Buddhist teachings, which posit four "foundations" with which one can establish mindfulness: movements and postures of the body; feelings or sensations; states of mind or consciousness; mental objects or phenomena. But as I've explained, the cultivation of mindfulness in Buddhism is oriented by an ethical imperative to become discerning about the wholesome or unwholesome generative conditions of habitual thought and action, so as to either nourish or relinquish them.

In directing the audience to "check in with the body," Google's advice doesn't appear to go beyond being "non-judgmental" about any feelings of dissonance or discomfort that might have arisen in relation to the protestors' allegations - feelings which, if investigated, might prompt the participant to seriously question the disjuncture between Google's public image as a responsible corporate citizen and its ethically questionable activities.

At another conference, Google's meditation guru Chade-Meng Tan was asked what he would choose if a time comes when Google has to make a choice between the common good and the survival of the company, to which he said he would advocate for the common good. This, however, should prompt us to consider more carefully Meng's claims about the compatibility of marketplace success with mindfulness

By framing the choice between the common good and Google's self-interest in hypothetical terms, Meng's response makes it seem like that this conundrum is not something that Google already confronts. But we need only be mindful of present circumstances to see that it is not the case. The fact is, Google has repeatedly shown disregard for the common good in its business practice. As Kevin Healey rightly observes, practices like Google's subverting of the privacy settings of iPhone users, and its covert collecting of personal data by means of the Street View Program already puts the company's self-interest at odds with the common good. The ethical conundrum of corporate mindfulness is not a problem for some imagined future.

Corporate uses of mindfulness function as a mode of attention policing, in that they work to deflect discerning attentiveness away from structural forces that drive inequitable business practices and shape workplace and everyday stress and anxiety.

According to Google's corporate vision of mindfulness, the broader social and economic conditions that circumscribe one's everyday thought and behaviour and relations with others and the world, are relegated as secondary issues to be addressed only after the primary matter of personal happiness and stress reduction has been dealt with. A key rationale behind such corporate adaptations of mindfulness is that equipping workers with the skills to manage stress or cultivate calm and composure would enhance performance and productivity.

But as engaged Buddhists Ron Purser and David Loy note, by framing it narrowly in terms of personal wellbeing such adaptations of mindfulness have avoided any serious consideration of the more fundamental question of why stress is so pervasive within corporatised institutional settings in the first place:

"Instead, corporations have jumped on the mindfulness bandwagon because it conveniently shifts the burden onto the individual employee: stress is framed as a personal problem, and mindfulness is offered as just the right medicine to help employees work more efficiently and calmly within toxic environments."

Engaged Buddhism broadens Buddhist teachings about the workings of afflictive conditions with the sociological understanding of the mutualising influence between personal habits and structural forces, between agency and structure.

From this spiritual-social perspective, it is arguable that corporate uses of mindfulness function as a mode of attention policing, in that they work to deflect discerning attentiveness away from structural forces that drive inequitable business practices and shape workplace and everyday stress and anxiety. By modulating attention in such a way, the conditions of our neoliberal political economic situation are left unquestioned and accepted as inevitable - as if this is how life "is really like".

Border control

With its practical teachings on conditionality and contingency, Buddhism can bring helpful insights to conversations on how we might individually and collectively set conditions for the present order of things to become otherwise. After all, one basic advice of Buddhism is to embody the contingent reality of change or impermanence "as it is" with compassionate wisdom, with an ethos of care and engagement. Engaged Buddhism draws attention to the social horizons of this spiritual advice, recognising the importance of addressing personal afflictions but also underscoring the need to simultaneously address the structural forces that condition afflictive patterns in the first place.

So we might ask: what exactly does the touted mindfulness revolution promise if prevailing regimes of domination, control and exploitation are left unchallenged and unchanged, such that the only recourse we have is to learn how to find happiness or cope with stress amid systemic inequality and injustice?

This question refracts broader debates about human meaning, ethics, and the role of spiritual self-cultivation. But as Ron Purser and Andrew Cooper have noted in their discussion of the "truthiness" problem of the mindfulness trend, current rhetoric leaves little room for Buddhist perspectives on these debates. What we find instead is a tendency to elevate science as the sole arbiter of truth about mindfulness, and along with this a trivialisation of Buddhist understandings and commitments.

This is evinced, for example, by Sam Harris's hubristic remarks that the Buddhist lineages of practice are little more than an "accidental strand" of history, and now that mindfulness has been freed from the "religion business" its true potential can be fulfilled by way of science - particularly Western science.

Today there is a tendency to elevate science as the sole arbiter of truth about mindfulness, and to trivialise Buddhist understandings and commitments.

Some might argue, as I have indeed encountered on many occasions, that a Buddhist should not be offended by such remarks because Buddhism or the "Buddha Dharma" is not really a "religion." It is true that the Euro-Christian concept of "religion" does not translate directly onto Buddhism, or for the matter other non-Western wisdom or sacred traditions. But it is equally the case that the oppositional categories of "philosophy" or "science" do not translate readily onto Buddhism either. Yet, such Euro-Christian-centric binary conceptualisations have served as the framework through which the truth claims of Buddhism have been evaluated and policed since its colonial "discovery" by the West as one of the "world religions."

As I note in my previous article, Buddhism is typically lauded for its seemingly natural compatibility with scientific rationalism when it serves Western hegemony. But when the seemingly incommensurable understandings and practices of traditional Asian Buddhist heritages are encountered, they are denigrated as outmoded or superfluously religious. French philosopher Jacques Derrida's concept of globalatinisation is instructive here. Postcolonial philosopher of religion Richard King explains that the concept of globalatinisation refers to a process of cultural translation that functions as:

"the epistemological equivalent of immigration and border control. [The Western paradigm of knowledge] has had a key role to play as a kind of intellectual border police or 'Homeland Security' office, making sure that any foreigners crossing the border are properly classified as 'religious' rather than 'philosophical' (that is, in the 'proper' western sense of the term). In effect, indigenous wisdom traditions of the non-western world are separated from their western counterparts at customs and forced to travel down the red channel. This is because, unlike western philosophies, they are believed to have 'something to declare' - namely, their 'religious', dogmatic or 'tradition-bound' features which mark them out as culturally particular rather than universal. Before being allowed to enter the public space of western intellectual discourse, such systems of thought must either give up much of their foreign goods (that is, render themselves amenable to assimilation according to western intellectual paradigms), or enter as an object of rather than as a subject engaged in debate."

This function of epistemological "border control" is evident in Sam Harris's insistence that Buddhist truth claims about the practice have become irrelevant in the face of scientific studies.

But the science of mindfulness is not unproblematic. Buddhist scholars like Bernard Faure, as well as scientific researchers like Catherine Kerr and Willoughby Britton have questioned the hype surrounding the science of mindfulness. Kerr notes that the media features tend to be sensationalist and selective in their reporting of findings, and that the demand for institutional and financial support also partly influences the way scientists (over) sell the case for meditation research. Reflecting on the unavoidable bias in meditation research, Britton acknowledges that mindfulness training is not an exercise that can be performed or extracted and studied in isolation: "It's an entire worldview and religion."

Buddhism is typically lauded for its seemingly natural compatibility with scientific rationalism when it serves Western hegemony. But when the seemingly incommensurable understandings and practices of traditional Asian Buddhist heritages are encountered, they are denigrated as outmoded or superfluously religious.

And here's the rub: if the knowledge and uses of mindfulness must necessarily be articulated and performed within a particular worldview, what is the worldview that frames the promises we encounter in claims about the mindfulness revolution?

Figuratively speaking, a frame is a constructed thing, an assemblage to help us, well, frame a particular view, to direct attention a certain way. I often use this analogy in class to ask students: is it possible to frame a way of looking, to direction attention towards a particular view, without bracketing things outside the border of the frame?

In the case of mindfulness, what is being excluded outside the frame or denied entry across the border? And given the constructedness of frames, how might the dominant frames surrounding mindfulness be reassembled to direct attention differently?

Who gets mindfulness "right"?

Incidentally, on the morning I started writing this piece I came across the January/February 2015 issue of Psychotherapy Networker, which features an article by senior editor Mary Sykes Wylie on the perils of the mainstreaming of mindfulness. The article provides a good overview of the key developments and debates of the mindfulness trend as it emerged from and spread beyond the American context.

Wylie's discussion considers some of the debates I have examined here under the rubrics of "attention policing" and "border control." But I noticed a bracketing function in her concluding assessment that accusations of Buddhism losing its "purity" to the crass ravages of modern corporate America are misplaced.

This misrepresents and sidesteps the criticisms of Buddhist commentators. As I have explained, engaged Buddhists are concerned about the avoidance of ethical considerations in corporatised or institutionalised deployments of mindfulness. They are concerned that reductive translations of mindfulness as some kind of panacea for the stresses of our hyper-capitalistic and anxiety-filled world, are glossing over the need to address the structural forces of systemic inequality and injustice that condition these stresses in the first place.

The contemporary mindfulness trend inherits but effaces the legacy of the mass lay meditation movement which developed in colonial Burma as a means to revitalise Buddhism and bolster nationalist resistance against Western imperialism.

These ethical and political considerations are not about immunising the imagined purity of Buddhism against contamination. Nor are they about asserting Buddhism as the sole arbiter of truth about mindfulness. If anything, they are questioning the prevailing regime of truth commanded by a Western-centric scientific paradigm that would act as an epistemological "Homeland Security" office to confiscate and detain the perceived "religious" or "traditional" features of Buddhist understandings in some epistemological detention centre, as it were. But what if the allegedly unnecessary "cultural baggage" to mindfulness offers a new vantage point from which to rethink and reorganise the prevailing neoliberal order of things?

And so Wylie asserts that "poor, innocent, little Buddhism" shouldn't be so worried, because "there never was a time when it wasn't deeply connected to the political and economic realities of the world." She adds that the idealised notion of the spiritual adept who is above and beyond this-worldly concerns, "isolated from the nonspiritual hoi polloi, is essentially a myth. Buddhism has long been deeply embedded in the larger political economy. Monks have often exchanged spiritual goods (chanting to produce merit for a donor or a donor's family) for economic support by the community." Noting that laypeople's merit-making practice is often motivated by mundane concerns - like success in love and business, good health and so forth - Wylie then claims that this makes "what most lay Buddhists in historical times wanted from their religion no different from what most people in most eras have always wanted, including people today."

Engaged Buddhists would agree with Wylie that Buddhism has never been all that poor or innocent, in that it is a historical formation that must necessarily negotiate historically contingent political and economic realities. (It is worth noting here that the contemporary mindfulness trend inherits but effaces the legacy of the mass lay meditation movement which developed in colonial Burma as a means to revitalise Buddhism and bolster nationalist resistance against Western imperialism.) Accordingly, it would be irresponsible to isolate oneself spiritually from this-worldly challenges. The responsible thing to do would be to bring an ethos of care and engagement to the afflictive conditions of one's political and economic reality.

Where engaged Buddhists would disagree is the claim that the logic of the economic relations between laypeople and the Sangha, and the motivations of lay practices of merit-making in historical times, are mirrored in the relations and motivations that characterise the contemporary neoliberal capitalist situation.

The distributional, sharing logics of the gift or salvational economy between Buddhist laypeople and monastics that took shape in markedly different historical and cultural contexts cannot be equated with the profit-making, wealth accumulation logics of our market economy. The merit-making practices performed by laypeople to secure this-worldly benefits were (and still are) guided by Dharmic principles and cosmological outlooks that differ radically to the ones that frame our globalatinised reality. Wylie does not seem to think that the difference between these principles and outlooks of a non-Western wisdom tradition merit careful consideration (perhaps it is a matter for "Homeland Security"?).

Framing the matter in such a way that the historical and cultural specificities of Buddhist understandings and practices are bracketed from view, Wylie's appeal to historicity to counter a misreading of Buddhist concerns about the mindfulness trend performs a poorly executed ahistorical sleight of hand. With this manoeuvre she concludes her article by musing that if the worst-case scenario for the mainstreaming of mindfulness in our "deeply stressed and stressful society" is that people become happier without becoming enlightened, then "so be it."

But, again, it was never the aim of engaged Buddhist critics to expect everyone who takes up mindfulness to follow the Buddhist path of Awakening as such. They are not dismissing the possibility that people might become happier with the help of non-Buddhist adaptations of mindfulness. What they are concerned about is how reductive translations of mindfulness as merely a means for managing stress under precarious conditions, deflects attention away from the historically contingent structures of power that shape these conditions in the first place. These generative conditions of systemic inequality and injustice need to be attended to with individual and collective mindfulness, care and engagement.

My point, therefore, in posing the question of who gets mindfulness "right" is not to seek a categorical answer. I am not trying to assert that Buddhism alone has the right answer. Rather, the task of getting mindfulness "right" lies in the questioning itself by the diverse parties who are cultivating the practice.

Particularly for engaged Buddhists, the questioning of mindfulness entails a mindful questioning of the habits and forces of "attention policing" and "border control" - the critique of mindfulness and the mindfulness of critique.

Edwin Ng is cultural theorist based at Deakin University, Melbourne. He has two forthcoming books: one on the role of faith in academia and its impact on reciprocal learning between Buddhist and Western understandings, and the other on the critique of mindfulness and mindfulness of critique.